Medical practice, clinical insights, and healthcare perspectives from a cardiac surgeon. Articles exploring medical literature, clinical guidelines, and reflections on medicine and patient care.
Narrative medicine transforms clinical practice through close reading and reflective writing. A comprehensive guide for physicians and researchers, from Rita Charon’s Columbia programme to Oliver Sacks, Tolstoy, and Jerome Groopman.
I went back to the Odyssey when Nolan’s film came out, for reasons that had nothing to do with medicine. I did not get far. Book I stopped me. Odysseus, we are told almost in passing, once sailed to Ephyra to find a man named Ilus, son of Mermerus, and to ask him for a … Read more
Deleting the patient name from a DICOM file feels like anonymization. It is not. A cardiac CT study I once pulled for a teaching file had a blank PatientName, a scrubbed PatientID, and a perfectly readable date of birth sitting three tags down in a private block the vendor never documented. The header looked clean. … Read more
SummaryDante Alighieri’s Inferno is a theological poem, yes, but it is also, almost incidentally, a forensic catalogue of medieval disease and healthcare. This article reads the poem through the lens of medical history: how Dante represents specific pathologies (dropsy, scabies and possibly leprosy, neurological deformity, hypothermia, traumatic mutism), how he mimics diagnostic observation, and how … Read more
I am a cardiac surgeon. My work is rooted in the operating room, in clinical decisions, and in the care of individual patients. At the same time, I have become deeply interested in medical data, statistics, coding, and artificial intelligence. My fascination with the history of medicine, however, has remained just as strong. At first … Read more
Machine Learning and Large Language Models for Clinical Text Analysis Article authored by Michele D. Pierri, MD Cardiac Surgeon & Medical Technology Researcher Last updated: May 2025 Reading time: 30 minutes Abstract The first two articles in this series traced a progression from rule-based pattern matching (regular expressions) to linguistic analysis (spaCy/scispaCy) for extracting structured … Read more
Introduction to Natural Language Processing for Medical Report Analysis: Advanced Linguistic Analysis with spaCy and scispaCy for Medical Reports Article authored by Michele D. Pierri, MD Cardiac Surgeon & Medical Technology Researcher Last updated: May 2025 Reading time: 30 minutes Abstract Regular expressions give us a solid foundation for pulling structured data out of clinical … Read more
Introduction to Natural Language Processing for Medical Report Analysis: Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions Article authored by Michele D. Pierri, MD Cardiac Surgeon & Medical Technology Researcher Last updated: January 2025 Reading time: 25 minutes Abstract Medical discharge summaries contain critical clinical information that remains largely inaccessible to automated analysis due to their unstructured nature. … Read more
How wearable devices and artificial intelligence are dismantling the wire-bound paradigm of intensive care—one sensor at a time. By Michele D. Pierri, MD, PhD In This Article Introduction: The Modern Monitoring Paradox A substantial share of adults now wear a device capable of tracking heart rate (HR), blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), and sleep architecture. Yet … Read more
Bergson’s Time in Acute Medicine: Why the Patient Is a Trajectory, Not a Timestamp There’s a quiet contradiction at the heart of acute medicine. We obsess over time. We count minutes. We chart vitals every few seconds. We schedule labs at fixed intervals, because if something is dangerous, surely it must be tracked. And still, … Read more